The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French studio was probed about recent AI controversies. Game director Guillaume Broche clarified some of the misinformation surrounding the studio and reiterated what other Sandfall developers have said about generative AI usage during interviews held earlier in the year.
Transcription of the Q&A comes courtesy of gaming content creator Sushi, who was one of the handful of influencers who were present at the session. Twitch streamer crizco prefaced his question by recounting the storm surrounding Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios' admission about using generative AI during game development.
They used it to create placeholders during development. It wasn't something they decided not to use before. It's just something that was meant to be replaced. Usually these placeholders are a missing texture image or just a magenta texture, but they used generative AI to create something that fit into the world. Because it fit they forgot to replace it.
Honestly, I'm not opposed to this usage. It's not like it's replacing an artist. No one was going to create a placeholder to be replaced. However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you'll forget to replace items with this technique, like we saw here. The old style of incredibly obvious placeholders were used for a reason; so that you can't forget to replace them. It's probably smart to keep doing this.